Severance's strange computers and claustrophobic hallways

Severance's strange computers and claustrophobic hallways

The computers in Lumon's vast underground office, the megacorporation at the heart of Apple TV Plus' thriller Severance, are downright bizarre. They appear to be an old Mac at first glance, but the closer you look, the stranger they become. The CRT display functions as a touchscreen in some ways. The gorgeous blue keyboard is accompanied by a massive trackball. The goal, according to production designer Jeremy Hindle, was to create a device that doesn't make much sense, mirroring the purgatory-like world that exists only within Lumon's basement. "The idea was that anything you could see underground didn't exist anywhere up top," Hindle explains. "You'll never see that computer or keyboard again."

This article contains minor Severance spoilers. 

Severance is set in a world where a new procedure — the titular severance — allows workers to split their lives in half after undergoing minor brain surgery. They essentially transform into two people: one who leads a relatively normal life and another whose entire existence is spent in a purgatory-like office. Because of this, the design of the office itself was crucial. It had to feel like it was somewhere outside of time and space. "You have to make sure that the inside and outside worlds are [different] enough that you're immersed in the world, so you don't feel severed when you're down there with them," Hindle explains.

Offices from the 1960s served as a starting point. "They're working in this office environment, and they're brought in just to be these pro-workers, and they're birthed into the place," Hindle explains. "It should be similar to how offices used to be." Beautiful desks, beautiful structures, and lovely lighting. It's all about work. There is one pen, a rolodex, and a phone on the desk. It felt like it had to have the same tone — but it had to be a lot more playful."

The offices in Severance appear to be fairly normal at first glance. They're well-lit, with clean white walls and green carpeted floors. But things aren't quite right in the macrodata refinement wing, where the majority of the action takes place. Despite the large size of the room, the four employees are crammed together via a cluster of desks in the center of the space. Things only get stranger from there. The hallways, which were designed to make people get lost, twist and turn in perplexing ways, and there are rooms filled with 3D printers and baby goats.

Despite its name, the breakroom is a bleak, dark place where employees are punished for breaking the rules. To get there, they have to walk down a long, narrow, and dimly lit hallway that is barely wide enough for a single person. "The space is what makes people feel uneasy when they watch it," Hindle says. "The ceiling is so low in [macrodata refinement] that even though the room is the size of a football field, it's claustrophobic in a strange way." (Series creator Dan Erickson once drew Hindle a map of the labyrinth basement, which he describes as a "maze," according to Hindle.)

Because the underground office is meant to be its own little world, the next step was to perfect the smaller details. "It's not a spaceship, but it is a spaceship," Hindle says, citing Alien as a major inspiration. That meant that everything in it had to be made in-house, from the desks with adjustable dividers and the snacks in the vending machine to the finger traps given out as bonuses. Hindle estimates that the production team created approximately 100 different products for use in the office, all of which were intended to evoke the Lumon aesthetic.

This brings us back to the computers. Those Lumon rigs, which employees use to find "scary" numbers in a Minesweeper-like program, appear to be hacked together from a variety of other machines. "The trackball made me laugh," Hindle says. "We kept asking ourselves, 'If you're experimenting on these people, what would you put in front of them?'" They were created not only to appear out of place, but also to give the cast of office drones — which includes Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, and a very charming John Turturro — something to play with while acting. "Imagine how much more fun it would be to sit at this thing than if I put a laptop in front of them," Hindle says.

"It's like a toy for kids."

Hindle claims that the computers are operational and that the actors are tampering with numbers on screen throughout the show. Before production began, the machines went through multiple revisions to get the size just right (among other things), so that they were large enough to be a focal point but small enough not to obscure the actors or interfere with their eyelines. "They're in this room for three hours in the first season," Hindle observes. It had to be something special and entertaining."

When you combine all of these elements — the retrofuturistic computers, the labyrinth layout, the '60s decor, the claustrophobic hallways — with voyeuristic cinematography that's frequently reminiscent of security camera footage, you get a show that's both instantly familiar and uncomfortably strange. Even a dance party takes on a tinge of horror in these offices, which, given one of Hindle's main inspirations, shouldn't be too surprising.

"It was really my Twin Peaks," he says. "The similarity is that they both have a tone to their writing, art direction, design, and cinematography." It exists in its own world."

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